Posted on 02/06/2020 12:07:41 PM PST by Bob Ireland
In many ways, the last surviving Neanderthals are a mystery. But four caves in Gibraltar have given an unprecedented insight into what their lives might have been like.
Forty thousand years ago in Europe, we were not the only human species alive – there were at least three others. Many of us are familiar with one of these, the Neanderthals.
Fossil evidence shows that, towards the end, the final few were clinging onto survival in places like Gibraltar.
In recognition of this, Gibraltar received Unesco world heritage status in 2016. ... "They weren't just surviving," the Gibraltar museum's director of archaeology Clive Finlayson tells me of its inhabitants.
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"It was in some way Neanderthal city," he says. "This was the place with the highest concentration of Neanderthals anywhere in Europe."
Clive, along with his wife Geraldine and son Stewart, has been excavating these caves for many years. All three are scientists.
While the front part of the cave is relatively open the back is darker and splits off into several chambers. The caves remain cool in the summer and slightly warm in the colder months.
Remains from the cave suggest that they exploited seafood and marine mammals. This is unsurprising given new evidence published in January 2020 that suggests they could swim. There is even evidence that they hunted dolphins, says Clive Finlayson. How they did so remains unclear, but we do know they hunted – or scavenged – large game like woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, deer and ibex. (Read about the drowned landscape where Neanderthals lived.)
More...
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Faces Re-Created of Ancient Europeans, Including Neanderthal Woman and Cro-Magnon Man
Neanderthal woman
I definitely have set next to her.
She tells me she knows Laz!
Thanks Bob Ireland. Just adding, not pinging, because I think this or something like it has appeared. Also, it's a fact that moderns carry DNA that is also found in the Neandertal remains (and very little has survived), meaning they are not cousins, but ancestors. By definition, that means they didn't go extinct.
Of course, the problem with the late Allan Wilson (died of cancer) was that he was coming at the Neandertal question from the same brain-dead, dead-end alley of Virchow and Darwin, both of whom cherry-picked morphological data. When Wilson was still alive, DNA research hadn't reached anything close to the current level, but it's my guess that, had he seen it, he'ds till cling to the same cryptoracist view.
The Neandertal Enigma"Allan Wilson had always been described to me in superlatives, such as 'one of the real geniuses in science,' or 'the most arrogant guy I know...' [H]e apologized for putting me off so long and bluntly explained that the reason he had done so was that he did not trust me... 'The anthropological perspective on evolution is no longer valid; it has been overthrown. And yet the science writers who insist on talking to me come drenched in an anthropological perspective, and there is really no point in talking to them... It is paralytic. It prevents you from asking certain questions, and it forces you to ask others. The whole discipline invites you not to investigate.'
by James Shreeve
...A few months before my visit, Wilson had announced at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science... that the Neandertals were replaced because they could not speak... suggesting that a particular gene for language might have been carried in the mitochondria themselves. Since invading males would have been more likely to mate with resident females than the other way around, the offspring of sexual contact between the two groups would be 'linguistically deaf-mute,' like their Neandertal mothers. Thus disadvantaged, these 'village idiots' would face the same fate as the mothers: extinction. Only the language-endowed African lineage would continue. The language gene idea, and especially the unfortunate term 'village idiots,' elicited hoots of derision from the anti-Eve camp, and gave no joy to Wilson's colleagues." [pp 119-121]
Hey, I saw that guy at Walmart two days ago.
Forensic modeling of intact skulls. Data suggests that on certain portions of the skull, skin and muscle layers are so thick. They use those datapoint son the skull and then layer a skin over it. You’re left with a fair approximation of what the person looked like in real life.
It’s been depicted on “Bones” and other shows (Dramatic / Documentary) many times.
They're also fairly old-looking.
Be out in the sun and weather all your life, you and I would look similar.
Why does anyone think they became extinct? The Democrat Party is full of Neanderthals.
“She has great huge ... tracts of land.”
They sold a Lot of car insurance.
Wouldn’t that be chariot insurance?
Oh crap. My23&me results gave me some traces.
kinda resembles lou diamond phillips...
Oh she’s a beauty lol
Everything was easier for Neanderthals.
Their make up kits sucked
George says....”Would you just look at these scumbags?”
A: HomoHomo
Lol... When the last time she was pictured on FR...?
Love it...
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